The Great Smoky Mountains, or just Great Smokies are best known as the home of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, which protects most of the range. The park was established in 1934, and, with over 12.5 million visits per year, it is the most visited national park in the United States. (14.13 million in 2021)

The name Smoky comes from the natural fog that often hangs over the range and results in large smoke plumes when seen from a distance. This fog is caused by the vegetation exhaling volatile organic compounds, chemicals that have a high vapor pressure and easily form vapors at normal temperature and pressure.

The Smoky Mountains in the Appalachian Mountains has ridge upon ridge of forest that straddle the border between North Carolina and Tennessee. This park is world renowned for its diversity of plant and animal life, the beauty of its ancient mountains, and the quality of the remnants of Southern Appalachian mountain culture.

This memorial in Newfound Gap commemorates the efforts of those who helped to establish the Smoky Mountains National Park, particularly the Rockefeller family who donated five of the twelve million needed to purchase the 520,000 acres of the park and the park was dedicated from this memorial by F. D. Roosevelt on September 2, 1940.

Great Smoky Mountains NP was a grand experiment because never before had a national park been created by buying private lands. Also, both North Carolina and Tennessee, with the support of many citizens purchased thousands of tracks of land and then donated them to the federal government.

After visiting several parks, I then head for the Great Smoky Mountains National Park driving through Seiverville, Pigeon Forge and Gatlinburg, TN, all three of which are virtual Zoos totally filled with turkeys: gobble, gobble, gobble.

If I live to be a hundred, never will I drive that route again as it took over an hour to drive the twenty miles along that horrendous carnival ride turkey house.

Upon arriving in the Great Smoky Mountains national park, I stop first at the visitor center for my collectibles and then up along a resplendent park drive to Clingmans Dome.

Up shortly after the sunrise and get out to stretch my old bones and see that the sun is shining brightly, the air is crisp, the sky is dark blue and clear. I spend a few minutes walking about but soon drive back up to Old Smoky for the views but don't stay long because I want to visit a few more places today before returning to Spring Hill this evening. Driving down on the North Carolina side is just as impressive as was the entrance to the park yesterday on the Tennessee side.